I spent a good deal of the summer holidays in the South Island. It seems from the people that I have spoken to on my return, that it was a good thing that I did! The weather up here in Auckland was less than summery and was very wet. In the South Island we baked, it was great.
I have created a time lapse video from the trip and you can see it below. Why share a ‘holiday’ video on an education blog? There are free apps for the iPad that enable time lapse projects to happen in class. A web cam and Sam Animation will turn any computer into a time lapse camera. The point being that from recording how the earth rotates to watching flowers bloom, takes time. Time lapse allows students to see what might be an abstract concept happen because this slow process can be sped up through time lapse. Sure there are plenty of time lapse videos for them to look at on the Internet, however if they were to create them for themselves, they would have a greater understanding of the time frames involved. The advent of digital cameras, web cams, free apps and software now make this once technical skill a simple reality in the classroom.
On a different note, each scene in the following video represents an hour of time, where I could do nothing but relax, let the camera do its stuff and marvel at the beauty around me.
The latest issue of Interface Magazine is out - issue 29 Term1, February 2011. In my article I discuss some of the issues covered in my Building a 5th wall presentation. So for those of you who did not get to see my presentation, here is some text that can accompany the slides of the previous post: http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=32&id=941
Today was my last day at Wakaaranga for 2010. This school has come so far in one year. When I started working there at the start of the year there was an overt climate of cynicism about the potential for e-learning. The staff had been fed a diet of unreliability with the network and had no real clear vision for the power of e-learning. When I made my presentation to the staff back in early December 2009, the climax was a tangible Tui moment of “Yeah Right!” But a year later, the staff, the school and now the parents all want in to the e-learning programme. So although this is my last day, I can not wait to get back in there next year to work with a new crop of now willing and not cynical teachers who also want to integrate e-learning into their class programme and witness the increased student engagement, attainment and enthusiasm to learn that other teachers have experienced this year.
Working with Shumba today, she wanted to share her progress this year, unbidden. Her one condition was not to be videoed, so I recorded her using Audacity. Listen to what she has to say here:
I have been working with staff from Westmere School since late 2009. Melissa is a Year 1/2 teacher and is in charge of e-learning integration at Westmere. In this video she shares how e-learning has impacted upon her pedagogy, classroom management and student attainment this year.
Kelly is about to leave St Joseph’s, but here she is reflecting upon the impact of e-learning on her classroom practice, classroom management and student learning outcomes.
In an earlier post I quoted the “Aha!” moment of one of the teachers that I work with. She has put the computers at the point of learning and in her case this means on the desks where the student sit in her class. This is a direct response to the kind argument that David Jakes makes in his slide show which I featured in a June post. The feed back from Maureen is that this simple act of moving the computers from the isolation point of the wall at the back of the room to where the students sit has had an immediate and dramatic effect upon the students’ learning and engagement with the tasks set. The images below demonstrate how this is working in Maureen’s class. Maureen has now requested from me the e-learning planning templates that I have developed in order that she can better plan to integrate a wider spectrum of meaningful e-learning interventions into her term 4 planning. I for one can not wait to get back to her class to see how her students are flourishing under their new layout.
The 4 August front page of UK Edchat #ukedchat featured many of the tweets I had made and also linked to my resources page. It is great to see that sharing in this way is getting the free tools and the e-learning message out to a much wider audience. May this continue!
A couple of websites have come out recently that when combined with each other make a perfect storm of potential outcomes for geographers and historians alike. Whilst some of them are not that old, they may be well known, but it is the combination of all three that has the greatest potential. The first of these tools that I became aware of was http://dipity.com a grate time line tool that enables a user to create a linear set of events from pretty much any resource at their disposal on the internet. Then came http://scribblemaps.com which enabled a user to overlay their own content onto a Google Maps page. Here the user can create shapes that might illustrate the phases of development, the alignment of troops on the battlefield overlaid on the modern topography. In addition the user can then add their own text and images to the map. The final tool in the triumvirate of tools is the newly launched http://historypin.com this tool encourages users to upload, link historic images of locations and places into a map and pin them to their actual location on the map. These images can then be compared against the current Google Street view image (where possible) in order that a comparison or an evolution of images can be compared against the present.
Now using the different tools a user can not only put objects in a 2D space of a map but represent that same data in a linear time line and embed all of that information into one source such as a wiki. Great for cause and effect and making links between information in space and time. A perfect storm of tools.
I ran a VC session into Haast School last week. The session was aimed at community and business leaders harnessing web2.0 technology to communicate and collaborate. The special impact here being that Haast being so remote from the rest of New Zealand has a special need to harness this kind of technology, in order to keep the community alive and connected to the rest of the world, whilst keeping the community viable and vibrant in Haast. It was a good session and from my end was facilitated by the good guys at Gen-i in Auckland, on the 17th floor to be exact. Once I had been set up the staff melted away and left me to it, I had the Pukeko room to myself. Whilst there I took the liberty to run a speedtest on the network connection I was using for my Internet access, not the VC connection. This is the result that it returned:
The speeds were stellar! Just imagine what a school could do with that kind of bandwidth, imagine the collaboration opportunities, the multi-media rich potential of such a resource. I went to share this information on Twitter, but was blocked. I tried Skype, but was blocked. I wanted to use Team Viewer, but was blocked. What an irony, stellar internet performance in a business environment where sending e-mails and browsing filtered internet are the norm. By comparison look at the kind of performance a school that I work in gets on their Telecom connection 5.5km from the exchange and an apathetic at best indifferent,help desk who have taken 63 calls to get some kind of attention to the fault evident in these stats. The school and the staff are bursting to use the Internet to its fullest potential but with this kind of connectivity find they can’t. As the crow flies this school is 10km from Gen-i and their blistering connection. This has all the echoes of a story I posted in 2008 http://dakinane.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/limping-along-in-the-internets-slow-lane/ How many other schools, not even in remote situations like Haast, but in urban settings like the school below, in New Zealand get results like this?
The video here is a prototype, but the infrastructure shown to use it is low tech and therefore accessible to schools. Just imagine the educational collaboration possibilities with such technology. Judging by the article this came from it might not be that far away either…
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The 4 August front page of 
